Psychological studies of touch and blindness have been fraught with controversy. Within this field there remains an important theoretical divide. Many researchers have taken a cognitive approach to the study of touch and blindness, relating these to higher order processes, such as memory and concept formation. Others adopt a theoretical perspective, arguing that it not necessary to consider the 'internal representation' of the stimuli, when investigating touch - thus people make use of information from the physical biomechanical properties of their (...) limbs as they assess the physical properties of objects. In addition, psychologists differ in the relative importance they place on the modality of sensory stimulation for subsequent perceptual experiences. Some psychologists argue that touch can do many of the things that are accomplished by vision, and claim that the mode of sensory stimulation is not critically important for perception, arguing that much information can be obtained through non-visual modalities. Others suggest that there are important consequences of a lack of visual experience, arguing for the importance of multiple forms of sensory input for conceptual development. New to the Debates in Psychology series, Touch, Representation, and Blindness brings together the leading investigators in these areas, each presenting the evidence for their side of the debate. An introductory chapter sets the theoretical and historical stage for the debate, and a concluding chapter draws together the different views and ideas set forth by the contributors, summarizing and resolving the discussion. (shrink)

Online social networks (OSN) have become a part of our daily lives whether they are used for socialization and communication or to promote business interests. OSN have become an important tool for businesses to advertise, create brand awareness, and promote their products and services. Business use of OSN for advertising purposes is highly reliant on targeted ads which display advertisements to OSN users based on their demographics and use of OSN, apps, and websites. Thus, one of the most valuable commodities (...) of OSN is the population of users and the information they share. To investigate the relationship between OSN site use, use of privacy settings, and how they relate to profile disclosure, a model is built based on the theory of reasoned action and the privacy calculus model. To validate the model, a survey is conducted and the results are analyzed with partial least squares. Risk and benefit were both shown to be significant antecedents of attitude. Both attitude and subjective norm, from the theory of reasoned action model, significantly affected OSN site use, while omitting intentions. OSN site use was significantly related to both profile disclosure and use of privacy settings. Last, use of privacy settings significantly affected profile disclosure. These results imply that use of privacy settings does not decrease the rate of disclosure. Giving users tools to protect their private information is important in protecting the privacy of OSN users, and it will lead to increases in safe disclosure of information helping OSN target ads effectively. (shrink)

In ‘The Choice Theory of Contracts’, we advance a claim about the centrality of autonomy to contract. Since publishing Choice Theory, we have engaged dozens of reviews and responses; here, we reply to Robert Stevens, Arthur Ripstein, and Brian Bix. All this rigorous debate confirms for us one core point: contract’s ultimate value must be autonomy, properly understood and refined. Autonomy is the telos of contract and its grounding principle. In Choice Theory, we stressed the proactive facilitation component of autonomy, (...) in particular, the state’s obligation regarding contract types. Here, we highlight two additional, necessary implications of autonomy for contract: regard for future selves and relational justice. These three aspects of autonomy shape the range, limit, and floor, respectively, for the legitimate use of contract. They provide a principled and constrained path for law reform. (shrink)

This book is a collection of recent lectures by Agnes Heller, delivered all over the world. These essays are edited and introduced by the author of the most significant intellectual biography of her work, John Grumley. In these lectures, Heller engages one of her greatest strengths: to discover philosophy within the very flux of contemporary events. These bring together such timely topics as refugees, human rights, truth in politics and the contemporary university as well as perennial issues like (...) the possibility of artistic representation of the Holocaust, the question whether revolutions are always betrayed, and the possibility of universality in the contemporary multicultural world. (shrink)

: A rich array of twelfth to fifteenth century Arabic texts captures the advent of a supererogatory prayer known as ṣalāt al-raghā’ib, on the eve of the first Friday of the month of Rajab in late eleventh-century Jerusalem, and its wide dissemination. This corpus offers an unusually vivid picture of the formation and the transformation of a medieval bid’a, or, of an ‘invention of tradition’. Combining our expertise in Islamic law and in Ayyūbid and Mamluk era history, we use this (...) corpus for an in-depth study of popular piety, power politics, scholarly polemics and legal discourse. Twenty eight translated excerpts of various texts are presented in this paper, preceded by a detailed introduction. Exploring legal reasoning in its concrete political and social context provides a nuanced understanding of the development, mass proliferation and ensuing debate over a highly controversial and extraordinary potent religious practice. (shrink)

J’examinerai ici le problème inépuisable de la signification de l’homogénéité sociale pour la démocratie politique, essentiellement à travers une analyse précise des concepts, et uniquement du point de vue politique, et non du point de vue social, économique ou éthique.Comme n’importe quel autre type de domination politique, le type..

In the 20th century the infiltration of scientific elements into philosophical currents not only reached its maximum, but also science itself became a "philosophical factor". We look at these processes in physics starting from the fall of mechanistic philosophy. The advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics has changed physics as science and raised a host of philosophical questions. Traditionally philosophical questions concerning space, time and causality cannot be any longer considered with no help of these theories. Relativistic cosmology and (...) its observational successes in the last decades of the century, for the first time in the history of human thought, provided a global framework for both science and philosophy. And the current search for the final unifying theory of physics leads directly to the most foundational questions of an ontological character. We argue that the success of the 20th century physics strongly suggests a kind of structuralist ontology. /// No século XX, a infiltração de elementos científicos nas correntes filosóficas não só alcançou o seu máximo, mas também é verdade que a própria ciência se tornou um "factor filosófico". O presente artigo considera estes processos na física, a começar com a decadência da filosofia mecanicista. O advento da teoria da relatividade e da mecânica quântica transformou a física enquanto ciência e levantou uma plêiade de questões filosóficas. Questões tradicionais acerca do espaço, do tempo e da causalidade não podem mais ser consideradas sem o contributo destas teorias. A cosmologia relati-vista e os seus sucessos observacionais nas últimas décadas do século passado, e isso pela primeira vez na história do pensamento humano, fornecem um esquema global tanto para a ciência como para a filosofia. Além disso, a busca corrente de uma última teoria unificadora da física conduz directamente às questões mais fundacionais de carácter ontológico. O autor do artigo defende que os sucessos da física do século XX sugerem fortemente uma espécie de ontologia estruturalista. (shrink)

This article outlines the contributions of the Kraków School to the field of science and religion. The Kraków School is a group of philosophers, scientists, and theologians who belong to the milieu of the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. The members of the group are engaged in inquiries pertaining to the relationship between theology and various sciences, in particular cosmology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience. The article includes a presentation of the historical background of the School, as well as its main (...) original contributions pertaining to the history of the interactions between science and religion, the rationality and mathematicity of the universe, theology of science, and the role of logic in theology. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 182-215.

Das Buch von den Ursachen, eine im 9. Jhdt. bei Bagdad entstandene, im 12. Jhdt. ins Lateinische ubersetzte und zunachst Aristoteles zugeschriebene neuplatonische Schrift, gehort zu den zentralen philosophischen Texten, die an den Universitaten des 13. Jhdts. gelesen werden. Ihr anonymer Autor entwickelt darin eine an Proklos angelehnte, jedoch zugunsten der Schopfungstheologie der monotheistischen Religionen abgewandelte Ontologie. Der Kommentar bildet eine wichtige Quelle fur Erkenntnisse zu Entstehung und Inhalt des Buches. Auch zeigt er die Arbeitsweise eines der grossten Denker des (...) lateinischen Mittelalters und ist ein wichtiger Baustein fur das Verstandnis des philosophischen und theologischen Werkes Thomas von Aquins, in dem er immer wieder auf das Buch von den Ursachen zuruckgreift. (shrink)

Every domain-specific ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general, domain-independent categories of reality. In the present paper we sketch a new type of upper-level ontology, which is intended to be the basis of a knowledge modelling language GOL (for: 'General Ontological Language'). It turns out that the upper- level ontology underlying standard modelling languages such as KIF, F-Logic and CycL is restricted to the ontology of sets. Set theory has considerable mathematical power and (...) great flexibility as a framework for modelling different sorts of structures. At the same time it has the disadvantage that sets are abstract entities (entities existing outside the realm of time, space and causality), and thus a set-theoretical framework should be supplemented by some other machinery if it is to support applications in the ripe, messy world of concrete objects. In the present paper we partition the entities of the real world into sets and urelements, and then we introduce several new ontological relations between these urelements. In contrast to standard modelling and representation formalisms, the concepts of GOL provide a machinery for representing and analysing such ontologically basic relations. (shrink)

Tziporah Kasachkoff received her doctorate in philosophy from New York University, teaches at The City University of New York, and has been a visiting professor at Ben Gurion University in the Negev, in Israel. Dr. Kasachkoff has published widely in applied philosophy and, since 1986, has been the editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy.

This practical guide for teaching philosophy brings together essays by two dozen distinguished philosophers committed to pedagogy. Addressing primarily practical issues, such as how to motivate students, construct particular courses, and give educational exams, the essays also touch on theoretical issues such as whether moral edification is a proper goal of teaching ethics.

THERE have been several attempts in recent philosophical discussion to present criteria for determining which words have ontological implications. I am going to concern myself with one attempt. The paradigm case argument has been appealed to in philosophical disputes ranging over such wide problem-areas as ‘other minds’, ‘freedom and determinism’ and ‘epistemological scepticism’. Reference has been made to paradigm cases in answering philosophers’ claims that ‘I can never know that another person is in pain’, ‘There are no acts of free-will’ (...) and ‘I can never know anything for certain’. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHICAL defenses of the intelligibility of religious utterances, and of the tenability of religious beliefs, have come more and more to appeal to the Wittgensteinian claim that concepts must be understood in terms of the forms of life which give rise to them.

PHILOSOPHICAL defenses of the intelligibility of religious utterances, and of the tenability of religious beliefs, have come more and more to appeal to the Wittgensteinian claim that concepts must be understood in terms of the forms of life which give rise to them.

Discussion concerning the meaning and analysis of “punishment” has centered, in large measure, on claims for a logical connection between “punishment” and “guilt.” However, more and more in the literature focus has shifted from guilt as the defining feature of “punishment” to guilt as only one of many constitutive conditions satisfaction of which is necessary for standard cases with allowance made for other correct, though secondary, uses of the term.